Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and I’m really excited to talk this week about something I’ve never talked about on the podcast, how to find your North Star and what the heck that means, and where I got that term from and all this stuff. Why it matters.
This episode was inspired by Coley. I can only assume your full name is Nicole, but Coley, welcome to the show, who asked by leaving a rating or review on iTunes, “I think the burning question in me currently is how do I pinpoint my North Star? I’ve been a part of Thrivers Society for less than a month, and I’m trying to do my best to go through the modules as quickly as possible and actually do the work, but more guidance on my North Star would be appreciated.”
Coley, thank you so much for asking the question. Piece of advice. I know you already know this, but slow and steady wins the race when it comes to business building, so don’t feel like going through Thrivers Society or any other coaching program anybody is taking, needs to be done fast. You’re the reason I bring that up now, and I know you’re not saying you were going to cut corners, Coley, I totally get where you were coming from, but the reason I say this is because with the North Star especially, people cut corners.
The North Star is actually a concept that I came up with back in 2018. There’s a very emotional story to it. I’m not sure that I’m ready to get that vulnerable and share it and tell it, but based on what I discovered and what I found and life experience, I found this really great meaning in the North Star.
As I started to have this connection to the concept of it myself, right around the same time I was developing a program that was called Best Year Yet. I actually very first hosted Best Year Yet down in Huntington Beach, California in the fall of 2019. It was hosted by my friend Deanna, a salon owner that I love and adore, down in SoCal way back when. I think at the time we sold out the space at 50 stylists. The entire workshop sold out in 24 hours. I went in and was like, “Let’s see if this concept of creating a North Star even works,” and it’s really catapulted from there.
Based on the success of Best Year Yet, I continued to refine the program in the system, which you may now know as Wealthiest Year Yet. This is my second major offer that I introduced to the stylists marketplace. Wealthiest Year Yet is an annual planning system for stylists, salon owners, and industry educators that includes a physical printed, hardbound, beautifully crafted annual planner, workbook, and business organization system shipped right to your doorstep. Not only do you get the education, but you get this beautiful physical planner as well.
This is something that’s evolved over a period of four and a half years, probably five years. I really started thinking about North Star and this was developed out of something that was massively transformational for me, and I thought, “Wow, if this works for me, I wonder if this can work at scale,” and based on the thousands of stylists who have participated in Wealthiest Year Yet, the thousands who have invested in the program every single year since 2019, it just goes to show that sometimes taking the leap of faith and developing a system based around what works for you can really work for others.
Let me talk about what the North Star is, why I created it, and then we’ll get into how to create yours.
I’m opening up a Wealthiest Year Yet planner and I’m going to read you the passage that I’ve included in this section of the planner. It says, “the North Star, known as Polaris, stays fixed in the night sky. Marking the sky’s North Pole, the point around which the whole sky turns. Polaris never rises or sets. It remains in nearly the same spot above the northern horizon year round, while all the other stars circle around it. Any day of the year, ancient sailors navigating the seas at night could find the North Star, recenter, and find their way back home. That is the power of creating your own professional North Star. From time to time, we all feel lost. Let this North Star section guide you home.”
Without getting into it, even just hearing that, you can probably imagine the kind of journey I went on as a human at the time I was connecting to the concept, the reality of what the North Star is. It’s a pretty incredible phenomenon that it is this fixed point in the ever complex night sky that for centuries, lifetimes, has guided people home.
And I thought, first of all, I want to find my North Star. I love the visualization of the North Star is fixed and the other elements in the sky dance around it. I thought if I could be so grounded in my vision, in my mission, in my goals, in my desire, in my focus, in my craft, in my target market, that I am fixed in what I do, no matter how the chaotic the sky is around me, I’m good, I’m stable, I’m solid. I loved that vision.
Then from there, I thought, and what if there was a North Star for my business? Not only am I a North Star in the way that I feel and see myself and my calling and all these things, I’m fixed.
I’m good. Anything can happen around me and I’m solid. But to also have an annual North Star for my business of this is what we’re doing, this is where we’re going. We may get sidetracked on our journey, but we are going to look up and we’re going to follow that North Star home.
My team and I started implementing the North Star into our business and brand several years back, and it was the catalyst for massive success. It changed everything for us.
I myself am a visionary. Probably a lot of you who are listening to the show are as well. It’s very common for entrepreneurs, those who create businesses, to be visionaries. If you’re a stylist or a salon owner, an esthetician, a makeup artist, a bridal stylist, whatever, if you chose to be self-employed, you’re an entrepreneur. If you chose to get a license to follow a trade or craft, you’re an entrepreneur. And generally speaking, we have big dreams. We have big hopes.
The other thing that we have is a tendency to get FOMO. A tendency to want to do it all and do it fast and not miss any opportunities. We get squirrel syndrome and we see this cool idea and we decide to chase it, and then we get burnt out and then we get overwhelmed and then we lose track and then our goals don’t come together. Can anybody relate? Very common to those who are self-employed, which our industry, even if you’re a commission stylist, you live and die by your own decisions, right? If you’re a commissioned salon owner, do you give your team an entire clientele? Like they don’t have to do a damn thing, they just show up to work and there are so many clients that you provide for them that they’re all slam-bam-booked busy and making more money than they know what to do. No, that’s exceptionally rare. Generally speaking, even employee-based stylists need to market for themselves, develop a brand, right, develop a message, develop a clientele.
In that essence, we are all on a personal journey to build a business. No matter where your paycheck comes from, we’re on it. I wanted to bring this North Star concept to life because it was so massive for me that I knew it would help others.
Let me first explain how we get to the North Star, because I’m not going to lie, I’m giving you about one sixth the recipe right now, but I want to focus on North Star because A) Coley asked this beautiful question, but B), this is the piece that messes a lot of people up.
When we look at North Star, North Star is actually the big, fun, exciting, sexy piece that everybody wants to get to in Wealthiest Year Yet. However, it’s step three of the annual planning process.
This is where most people get business planning wrong. Well, there’s a few ways that people get business planning wrong. One, they only plan for business at the end of a year, right? November, December, maybe January, we think about what we’re going to do in the year ahead. That is so foolish.
My team and I quarterly plan, which we do here in Wealthiest Year Yet as well. Literally my team and I run this exact system. If you’re like, “How does Britt do it?”, this is how. We quarterly plan, but we annually plan twice a year.
We annually plan usually sometime in Q4—it varies though—and then usually sometime in Q2. How much changes in your business in a year if you’re growing, like if you’re aggressively doing stuff and chasing big initiatives, your business will change fast. If your crew’s controlling it, then yeah, maybe not that much will change. But not that much will grow either.
If you are hiring, expanding, evolving, taking on more learning, improving, you need to sit down and center around your business and what you’re up to more than once a year. I mean, come on. It’s like only cleaning your house once a year. Who in their right mind would do that, right? It needs to be maintained.
So whenever we sit down and we’re doing annual planning, we start with a period of reflection. That’s phase one. Then we dream, then based on the reflections and the dreams, we create the North Star. Once the North Star has been established, we can create social content, we can strategize how to execute the North Star, and then we do the execution.
All six phases are included in my Wealthiest Year Yet system, but we’re going to focus on North Star specifically today.
The reason we start with reflection is you can’t dream properly until you’ve reflected. The reason we dream before we North Star is because you won’t know what your North Star is until you’ve reflected, dreamt, and reconciled everything.
Here’s what most people do when they goal set. They’re like, “Hi, I’m Britt. In the next 365 days, I want to make this much money. I want to have this many Instagram followers, I want my life to be like this and I want to take a vacation in wherever.” That’s the goal and that’s the annual plan. They’re excited for a very short period of time and they do some brainstorming and they write down three major things that they can take action on that’s going to help them to get there. Then it kind of fizzles.
Can anybody relate? Has anybody walked that journey where you start off a period of enlightened business growth, whether it be at the new year or any other time, and you’re like, “I’m in, I’m going to do this.” You have big hopes and big dreams and big aspirations and you set a handful of goals and a few action steps to get there and it lasts for a very short period of time. Then you’re back to where you started.
That is how over 90% of not just our industry, but Americans today operate. In doing it this way and not just casting a goal, creating some action items, and praying, we do this very strategically.
Assuming that Coley has already done the reflection and done the dreaming, now Coley’s at North Star. When we talk about North Star, it is not one dimensional, it’s multi-dimensional. I’m going to start with the 365-day vision statement and then I’m going to talk about all the pieces that follow.
This is actually the piece that mucks a lot of people up. I added this vision statement, I think it was last year was the first time I did it. It’s a two-parter and it’s a statement that we create.
Now, you can’t create this properly until you’ve done reflect and dream in full. You can try, but I promise you it won’t come together. It’ll be really challenging. The statement looks something like this: “Next year will be the year I _____ and the result will be ______.”
Well, that seems very easy at surface level. People do things like, “Next year will be the year I make a hundred thousand dollars and the result will be I’ll be proud of myself, I’ll be living in a better home and I’ll be able to go on vacation to Paris,” or whatever.
I would bet money that if you created a North Star statement like that, you won’t actually execute it.
Now the idea behind it was good. The execution of how it came together was poor, but it’s often how we do things and it’s generally how we do things if we haven’t done the deep work leading up to it.
Those are all very superficial goals. Going to Paris would be amazing, but here’s what happens. If the North Star was to make the money so that you move into the nicer house, you have a bunch of social media followers or whatever, and you take the trip to Paris, cool. Anybody who’s achieved success doing it this way will tell you when the stylist who created that North Star moves into the new house, comes back from Paris, they’re going to look around their life and say, “So now what?”
It’s funny, it’s a really empty victory and you can only understand what I’m saying if you’ve ever achieved a goal you’ve set that—and we’ve all done it. I’ve done that too where I create these surface-level goals and then once I achieve it, it actually almost feels vapid. It’s a really strange thing.
But that’s how a lot of us create North Star goals is we say, “Next year’s going to be the year I do this, that, the other thing.” Your task list like I talked about before and the result will be whatever it was, goals that you set out to achieve.
That’s not how we do it. When we create a North Star, it has to be so well stated that when you read it, it gives you feelings, like it makes you emotional, you would do anything to make that happen and in no way will achieving it feel vapid.
When I run Wealthiest Year Yet—most people who participate in Wealthiest Year Yet do some kind of group coaching element, either Momentum, which is one year long, or VIP, which is eight weeks together. When I do the coaching, when people are creating their North Stars and they’re doing it properly, we have people crying in the room. We have people’s partners messaging me saying thank you for the breakthroughs. I mean it’s because it’s deep.
When a goal and a vision for your business is so critical that you would live under a bridge for a year if it meant being able to achieve what you wrote down here, I’m here to tell you there is not a chance that that thing is not going to come together.
Have you ever made a goal and you’re like, “Well, we didn’t do it again this year.” “Well, we came close, but we didn’t quite achieve it.” It’s because it was soft. There was not enough behind it.
The only reason why I’ve been able to build the business I have, sustain the marriage I’ve got, and have the relationship with the children that I have is because of North Stars like this. Because the way I’ve cast them has been so deep and so profound that I will move heaven and earth to make those things happen and I’m not willing to make personal sacrifices to do so. That is a properly created North Star.
So when Coley says, “How do I pinpoint my North Star?”, the reflect and the dreaming is step one. And when we reflect, we look at all the aspects of our business as they exist today. What lifts us up, what brings us down, what we’re naturally good at, what we get compliments for, what we want to be good at, but we’re not good at. The areas where we are uneducated, the people that we follow on Instagram who don’t make us feel good about ourselves, the people that we follow on Instagram who simply confuse us. We look at all of the actions and the clients that don’t lift you up anymore, right? The coworkers that don’t make you happy. We look at all of the facets of your business and we start to really unravel how your business makes you feel.
We have two sections of reflect: the facts and the feelings, and it even says that in the book facts and feels and we balance out the two. As you start to balance the two and peel the onion, it starts to become very clear what you should be working on in the year ahead.
Define true wealth. I define wealth in four areas: health, time, love and money. If you just have the money, I’m here to tell you you’ll be miserable. If you only have the love, you might not have the money, the health or the time, but love is cool, but as long as you’re willing to sacrifice everything else, time, wealth for me time, wealth is the greatest asset. Money comes and goes. Time, once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. So time wealth is going to be critical. That’s why when people still are into the hustle culture and working long hours and it’s like is that really worth it to you? Are you going to look back at the end of your life and be like, “Well, that was worth it.” You just have to start asking yourself those things, right?
And then health wealth. As soon as our health goes, we have nothing, so taking care of our physical, mental, spiritual, emotional health is critical as well.
When I say when we reflect, we deeply understand what wealthy looks like, it’s on all those aspects. You really start to say, “But what am I doing all this for?” Can you see how nobody would say, “I became a hair stylist to make a hundred thousand dollars so I could buy a nice house and go to Paris”? Can you see how vapid it even sounds as I say it in this moment? Come on, that’s not your North Star. That’s a cool thing to do. I’d like to go to Paris at some point too. At no time will that ever make my North Star. It’s not enough that it’s so critical that you would do anything to make sure that it happens.
I know this sounds deep and like “Whoa, is it really that serious?” I don’t know. Do you achieve every dream and aspiration you’ve ever had? Do you consistently do it year over year? ‘Cause I’ll be honest, I do, but it’s because I have a different system and a different way of doing it.
I invite you to really reflect and really think about all those areas of wealth that I just mentioned and ask yourself how are you showing up in each of them? Are you clear on what time wealth looks like to you? Are you clear on what health wealth looks like and are you doing it? Do you know what love wealth looks like? When I say love wealth, I mean healthy relationships. If you have any toxic relationships in your life, you’re not wealthy. Love wealth is not always romantic. I obviously have love wealth with my husband. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be with him. That’s the kind of wifey I am is like this is either going to be effing amazing or what are we both do? Life is too short and we both agree on that, so it’s really effing amazing.
Love wealth is more than just that though, right? There’s love between me and my children. I even consider love wealth to be me and my team at FSBD, and again, it’s not a romantic love at all. It’s a caring, though, and love to me encompasses all relationships and I don’t want anybody here who doesn’t want to be here. I don’t want anybody here who’s toxic to the group. They can’t stay. It doesn’t make sense. In my extended family, in my personal life, my friend circle, my neighbors, the people my kids hang out with, all of that counts.
I don’t keep toxic people in my life anymore. I’ve cut out a lot of people and it ain’t personal like for them. It’s personal for me.
When you look at all those areas of wealth and it starts to become really clear what your North Star is actually supposed to look like and you can see why people get emotional about this because you actually start designing a life and not being a byproduct of it when you do it this way, it’s really, really powerful.
So we do that reflection first, then we dream about what is possible, and we think about what really matters and what really counts. Once we get those dreams on paper, then we craft that North Star statement.
Now once that statement’s made, then we go on and we finalize our North Star.
We have the inspiration list and the influencer inspiration. There are two different sections. The inspiration list is the podcasts you’ll listen to, the books you’ll read, the paid classes you’ll take, and the influencers you’ll follow for the next 365 days. This gives you focus and prevents the squirrel syndrome. You don’t get to detour from this list. This list is created based on the North Star that you set and we work together collaboratively to create the list.
But if in a year you want to make a new list, you can, but you’re committing to yourself and to your North Star that for 365 days and/or until that North Star is created. Sometimes we achieve the North Star before the time is up. You’re going to just focus on these podcasts, these books, these paid classes, and these influencers. That’s it. No confusion, no diversion, that’s it.
Then we do influencer inspiration. We list four influencers that we think can help us to get to our North Star and that’s all that we follow. Does anybody follow a lot of influencers and start to get confused ‘cause there’s a lot of messaging out there? I used to do that too. I used to read a lot of business books, listen to a lot of podcasts, follow everybody and their mother. What I found was I spent a lot of money on things that didn’t help me. I was confused, I chased a lot of random ideas. Now I have one very high-end coach. I listen to two podcasts a week and I read maybe four business books a year and I go back and reread a lot of books that have been impactful for me.
Instead of trying to read 15 books in a year, I try to know a small handful front and back, right? Deeper, not wider.
Then we set our benchmarks. Some of the benchmarks I have in the planner are 365-day gross income goal, 365-day net. Gross versus net, which you make versus what you take home. Best-day-ever income goal, successful monthly net income goal, total new guest single successful, monthly new guest goal, new guest retention percentage, goal base clientele retention percentage goal, and then benchmark deadlines for each of those.
Then we look at what Awareness marketing efforts will drive most of the new business. Choose two answers max and I give a checklist of different ways that you can drive awareness to your business, but I force you to pick two.
Creating a North Star is about focus. Think about Polaris. It’s a singular spot in the sky. I didn’t say pick 17 stars. I said we’re going to focus on one and so this is all about refinement and that’s why I call it the North star ‘cause it’s small.
What’s your dream schedule look like and when can you commit to creating it?
Then we have salon owners’ goals. What’s the profit share goal? What’s the number of stylists you want working for you? What’s the successful monthly profit goal for the salon? Successful profit margin goal, right?
Then we have our industry educator and influencer goals. What do you want that income to be monthly and annually? How many private coaching students do you want to see? How many classes do you want to teach, right? How many courses do you want to sell? Whatever.
Then we have our bridal stylists’ goals. Gross income as a bridal stylist, monthly, annually. How many weddings you want to book.
Then a space where you can write in additional benchmarks.
We create social media goals for platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Google Business, and Yelp. Core Four, anybody? And then I also have space for you to add in any other social media platforms that you choose to follow.
So Coley, I know that was a lot of information, but when you say how do I create a North Star, the reason why you’re struggling is because you’re likely doing it right. You know it’s not vapid, you know that it’s deep, and I hope this has given you some guidance.
Y’all, as I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
